Issue 25: Nov 2002
Features
- | Foreword
- | Pocket an Atari!
- | Collecting Atari Games
- | Tip of the day
- | Unfinished Business
- | I had a dream: The Grid Sequencer!
- | Atari in the USA: Mr Atari's IDE
- | Atari 7800: The system that could (but didn't)
- | Tablet PCs in Today's World
- | Atari Goes Metal
Reviews
- | Unreal Tournament 2003
- | V-Rally 3
- | Do you have 19 inches of rack mounted Atari?
- | Multi Worms
- | Pixel Power
News
| Multi Worms
The great scramble Once upon a time at the Unconventional 2k I saw for the first time a game for the Multilink. It was Multi Dash. Jiri Bernasek wrote it for an existing network system nobody remembered. Well to see eight XL/XE computers connected via a SIO network was very impressive. So soon some people wanted to know how it works to code some games. So Jiri was bombarded with questions. He gave me a piece of code at the ATARIADA 2k1, but he warned me that it is hard to understand, because it is documented in Czech. But he promised to make it more modular and to make a simple and documented example. At the ATARIADA 2k2 Jiri released his next Multilink game, called Multi Race. Together with this game he released the example, Multi Worms. At a RAF meeting at my apartment, we finally built up a network and tested the game. As with all the other Multilink games there is a master and some slaves. You load the game on the master, connect the slaves via the SIO bus and power on the slave(s). The game automatically boots over the network, so you need only one floppy drive! On every master or slave there can be two players. You can choose which joystick each players will use (or keyboard). Type in the name of the player(s). On the master you can choose whether you want a failed player to disappear from the screen, or his corpse be an obstacle for the other players. You can also send messages to each other player. A popular sentence for example is, "It wasn't my fault, the joystick you gave me doesn't work". The game starts when the master and the slaves declare themselves ready. You control a little worm. This worm has to eat some apples and avoid some skulls. With every apple he eats he becomes longer. Besides the optional skulls, the worm has to avoid hitting the other worms (players). New apples appear somewhere else after you eat one of them. At the beginning the worms aren't long, so you have to concentrate to get the apples, not the skulls. Later when the worms become longer, you have to be careful not to bump into another worms. The more apples you eat the more points you score. Multi Worms is at first sight similar to Cervi from Raster/CPU. But instead of having five seconds time to find your worm (Cervi), in Multi Worms your worm starts when you first hit the joystick. This is less stressful for the players. We can look forward to some fine new XL/XE network competitions in the future. thorsten@myatari.co.uk |  | Mad Butscher The principle of the game is explained in five sentences, that's mostly an indication of a fun game. So it is. The rules are easy to understand, the menus are few in number and self-explanatory, the graphics are simple but the fight against the other worms is exciting. The network works effectively without problems, so you forget that you are playing on a network after a while. Bunsen When I first played it, I knew, for me Multi Worms is the best multi-player game so far. Playing in a network with up to ten people on five systems (if you have five TVs and enough space) is cool. Also the game-play is great to play. Uncle Harry With Multi Worms, Jiri Bernasek proved once again, that simple game-play, technically well adapted and innovatively improved (network), is a great mixture to have fun with your 8-bit Atari. Carsten Strotmann Yet another great game from BeWeSoft. Titled as, "just a demo for a magazine" is a great understatement. It's similar to Cervi (Worms), but totally different game-play. It's very funny to play. Really a highlight this year.
Game information
Name: | Multi Worms
Author: | BeWeSoft
Requires: | Atari XL/XE Joysticks Multilink network adapters
Players: | Up to ten
Price: | Freeware
Useful links
The Atari 8-bit network interface (MyAtari issue 6) http://www.myatari.net/issues/apr2001/network.htm Mathy van Nisselroy's Multi page http://www-users.rwth-aachen.de/mathy.van_nisselroy/stuff.htm
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